Ludlow: Site of the Ludlow Massacre

Back in 1914, a tent colony of coal workers on strike got attacked by the National Guard and members of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. A total of 21 people were killed in what is now known as the Ludlow Massacre, including many miner’s wives and children. It was a pretty dark day in Colorado’s history, and while we’re really sorry to be the bearers of bad news, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out that this event also occurred on April 20th, so try to not think about that the next time you sit back to spark up and the Pineapple Express grabs you by the balls. While gruesome, it was also a huge turning point for labor laws across the nation. Without it, many child labor laws and the eight-hour workday would have been created years later, if not at all. If you get an itch, you can still drive out to Ludlow, which is now a ghost town and located just north of Trinidad. Last time we passed through, we poured one out for the brave men, women, and children who died so that we could sling waffle fries at Chik-Fil-A at the age of 14 instead of being sent to work in a coal mine.

B-17 Crash Site

Back in 1944, a B-17 (we’ll save you a Google: it’s the military aircraft and not the bingo number) on an army exercise crashed into a snowy mountainside near Bellvue, killing four of the 10 people on board. Its wreckage can still be found in the talus field where it crashed, and if you’re up for a 12 mile hike, you can walk out there and stare at some unsettling pieces of plane. Hell, the crash site even has its own Alltrails page. As it turns out, there’s actually a startling amount of planes that have crashed in the Colorado backcountry. When we say “startling amounts” we’re not talking, like, seventeen B-17s. We’re talking upwards of 700 crashes between civilian aircraft and military crashes. If you really want something to do this summer, you should go find them all, and then rub them in your elitist trail runner friend’s face when they try to bring up their ultralight thru-hike on the Colorado Trail.

Ted Bundy’s Infamous Escape Site in Pitkin County

If you’re a fan of serial killers (which is kind of fucked up, to be honest) we’d definitely recommend checking out the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen. If you walk up to the front of it, you can still see the window where proverbial and also literal lady killer Ted Bundy bailed out of a second story window, sprained his ankle, and led law enforcement on a manhunt for six days back in 1977. While we love a good Shawshank jailbreak story, this wasn’t even Bundy’s best escape; he basically hobbled around on his busted ankle in the Aspen backcountry, breaking into cabins and trailers, twice missing trails that could have led him south into Crested Butte. He eventually got taken back into custody, got transferred to the Garfield County Jail, and, having lost 35 pounds in what we only assume was a “I refuse to eat anything since you won’t let me batter and strangle women” hunger strike, sawed a hole into the ceiling and escaped again. He stole a car that broke down, got picked up by a passing motorist and dropped off near Vail, caught a bus to Denver and boarded a plane to Chicago, landing in Illinois before prison guards even noticed he was missing.